Quinn praises LIC businesses

During an early morning breakfast meeting, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn praised businesses leaders in Long Island City for their hard work and reaffirmed her commitment to help them continue to succeed.
Quinn spoke about providing more affordable health care to small business, lessen the unincorporated business tax and eliminate the S-Corp double taxation as a few items that would help the business community.
“We’ve tried to honor your commitment to Long Island City by really focusing a great deal on what we believe are the needs of small businesses in our city,” Quinn said at a Long Island City Business Development Corporation meeting on Wednesday, April 23.
In March, Quinn came to Jackson Heights Queens in order to introduce a plan that would provide affordable health insurance to roughly 4,500 small business employees from Manhattan and Queens (1,500 in Queens) in an expansion of the Brooklyn HealthWorks program that the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce began in 2004.
Businesses with 2-50 members and 30 percent of the employees earning under $36,500 could be eligible to enroll in Quinn’s plan, which the Queens and Manhattan Chambers of Commerce would help facilitate.
“Our first priority is to expand into Queens and then expand into Manhattan,” Quinn said.
In addition to Quinn, City Councilmember Eric Gioia, who represents Long Island City and Councilmember Peter Vallone, who represents nearby Astoria also spoke to the business leaders praising their efforts to improve the neighborhood.
“Everyone in this room should be extraordinarily proud about what we have accomplished over the past five or six years in Long Island City,” Gioia said.
Meanwhile, the councilmembers also spoke about the prospects for the future with many planned developments underway and the need to remain committed to making the new developments affordable and accessible to the middle class.